My concerto’s so much better than the movies…
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
I had tea once with Miklos Rozsa in a friend’s flat, around the corner from Abbey Road. It was my first encounter with a Golden Age Hollywood composer, and I had far more curiosity than he was prepared to satisfy. He wanted to talk about his concert works, not movie scores. I kept reverting to The Jungle Book and Julius Caesar while he nudged me towards his neglected concertos.
This violin concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz in 1953, took three years to reach the stage while the soloist fiddled around with the score. Heifetz had been savaged by critics for premiering Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s movie-highlights concerto; he did not want to get burned twice….
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
This was his best score, by far, with its modal sound world and modern orchestration. Those beautiful leaps….
In many ways, the music was superior to the film. Great script but histrionic performances from Heston and the female cast. Stephen Boyd was simply fabulous as was the extraordinary Hugh Griffith!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dApIMjrn2Vg
I’m reading Steven Smith’s biography of Max Steiner and there’s another great film composer.
The soundtrack (just like the film) would have been better off without the Bible kitsch, if that could be helped.
I will probably remember Rozsa best for the background music “Fight for Calahorra” in another Charles Heston film.
Unfortunately that ‘bible kitsch’ was part of those biblical epics at the time!! He did this successfully, anyway, and IMO the reason for that was because the fanfare and the grandeur of both the story, the soundtrack and the widescreen experience were all reflective of the power and prestige of the MGM studios at that time. Remember that during the baroque period fanfares often preceded the operas (I’m thinking particularly of L’Orfeo). This was about summoning the audience to attention but also about ducal splendor and grandeur; so it was with MGM and the ultimate biblical story as a representation of that prestige.
Producer Sam Zimbalist, who died before the film was released, would have stressed this in his brief to director Wyler, screenwriter Tunberg (and his team) and composer Rosza. (DeMille at Paramount had tried that 2 years before that but this failed miserably because of his OTT over-reach and kitsch melodrama.)
These epics were meant to drag people out of their homes and away from their TVs and back into the cinemas. A foretaste of today’s dilemmas in movie-making!!
The love theme, and Haya Harareet, always get me.
I have loved the Rosza concerto for 40 years and have been continually frustrated that it hasn’t gained mainstream acceptance; IMHO it’s a much better piece than the Korngold.
Interestingly, when it gets played it’s usually by concertmasters; I guess most touring soloists don’t want to bother to learn a piece they’re unlikely to be asked to do much.
Agreed! (ecept for your typo: Rozsa, not Rosza…)
Rozsa’s cello concerto (op. 32) was written for Janos Starker, and is also worthy of attention.
The Piano Concerto is also worth hearing, and this old video with Leonard Pennario still strikes me as the best way to get to know it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO8ccRJ6vG0
This is not to be confused with Rosza’s “Spellbound” Concerto which is of course pure movie music, but entertaining enough.
The score to Ben-Hur may have been the best thing he ever composed. I listened to it on LP in my teens in the sixties. It was one of the works that inspired me to listen to classical music.
Rozsa was not that good. His concert works are trashy and his film scores are very boring.
Hugo Friedhofer was so much more talented and a genius orchestrator – Robin Hood, for Korngold and Gone with the wind.
https://youtu.be/NIqBdbL0MT4?si=pqF3C647dKD2m8SB
The Rozsa concerto would have been better paired with either of the Dohnanyi violin concerti, assuming that the performance of the Bartok (obviously the best work of the lot) is as pedestrian as NL’s review states.
I have a recording of the piece with Heiftz playing.